Gathering Stardust

Over the next several months, I will be offering my three workshops—on shame, spiral time, and mise en place—free to all members of Divergent Design Studios. If you can’t afford the lowest monthly fee of $5, email me at marta@martarose.com (no questions asked, no explanations needed) and I will send you a link for a free membership.

Some of you may be familiar with my Instagram post, and subsequent workshop, about what I have come to call Spiral Time.

With this metaphor for understanding time—which is a metaphor that came to me and is related to how I have always synesthetically “seen” time, but which is also related to many ancient and indigenous ways of understanding time—I talk about two phases of being in time as it relates to a creative project or even a creative era in our lives. Sometimes you are in the “getting shit done” phase, and sometimes you are in the “spinning out in space gathering stardust” phase.

The thing is, for those of us who are multi-passionate, who have very busy minds and multiple special interests, our creative energy in time doesn’t look like a single orbit in space, but rather more like this:

It can be a lot. At any given moment, we may be getting shit done in relation to some creative projects and eras of our lives, and we may be spinning out in space gathering stardust in relation to others.

When our creative lives and our source of income are intertwined, as they are for so many of us who are trying to survive in capitalism and also be artists, the fluctuating nature of our various relationship(s) with time can be overwhelming and scary.

I recently sent out an email asking subscribers to suggest topics for me to write about, because lately my well has felt dry. I received a bunch of great ideas, but even that hasn’t seemed to prime the pump. But I was struck by two very kind responses, one of which simply asked “how are you?” and the other asked “do you even want to be writing?”

So here’s the truth: I’m doing great—like really great—except for feeling guilty about the fact that I don’t really want to be writing right now—certainly not at the pace of once-a-week, which is sort of the expected standard for substack newsletters. And that makes me feel anxious, because some of you are actually paying me to write this newsletter, and those subscriptions amount to about one month’s income each year for my family. Not a lot, but not nothing.

When it comes to sewing, crocheting, craftivism—actually *making* with my hands, things I can wear on my body or cover myself with or hang on my walls, I am very much in the getting shit done phase of my creative spiral. I feel on fire and more excited creatively than I have in such a long time.

But when it comes to how to write about all that, I am very much out there gathering stardust.

In fact, in my life in general, I feel like I am in a liminal space floating between eras—I just turned 60, it’s been 10 years since my divorce, Joel has retired … I feel like I am moving slowly through a portal, and I know that on the other side is something exciting and wonderful, and I feel confident that it will give me so much to write about.

But I also know, there is no rushing the gathering of stardust. There is no racing through liminal spaces. When portals open up, you have to respect the slowness.

I do think collaboration is the key to everything good in the world, and I have some collaborative projects in the works behind the scenes that hopefully will have The Spiral Lab active and vibrant again, even as I float around in liminality, crocheting and sewing with the zeal of the convert.

For those of you still sticking around—especially those of you paid subscribers—I appreciate you. Your ongoing support means a lot.

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